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CURRENT DIALOGUE December 2011 51 CURRENT DIALOGUE December 2011 Special Issue : Christian Self Understanding in the Context of Buddhism Editorial – Clare Amos 2 Introduction to Special Edition of Current Dialogue – Rev. Dr. Shanta Premawardhana 3 Report of the consultation Christian Self Understanding in the Context of Buddhism December 9-12 2009 7 The Belief and the Behaviour of the Church in the Lankan Buddhist Context – Fr Aloysius Pieris, s.j. 11 Reply to Dr Aloysius Pieris s.j.: What would a Christian church incarnated in the Buddhist context of Sri Lanka believe, how would it behave? – Dr Elizabeth J Harris 20 The Transformation of Christian Self-Understanding in Relation to Buddhism – Professor Perry Schmidt-Leukel 25 Response to Perry Schmidt-Leukel’s paper – Professor Christine Lienemann-Perrin 38 Seeking self-understanding as Christians in a Buddhist context – Rev. Dr Leopold Ratnasekera OMI 42 Minority Christian Identity in the Context of Majority Buddhist Identity in Sri Lanka – Rev. Keerthisiri Fernando 48 The Significance of Buddhism for Christian self-understanding in the West – Rev. Dr Ruwan Palapathwala 54 Christian Self-Understanding and the Question of Dual Belonging – Dr Rose Drew 60 What can Christians learn from Zen? – Sr Katrin Amell O.P. 70 Without Christ I Could Not Be a Buddhist: An Evangelical Response to Christian Self- Understanding in a Buddhist Context – Prabo Mihindukulasuriya 73 “Show Me Your Resurrection” – Professor David Eckel 88 ISSN 1814-2230 Current Dialogue can be found on: www.oikoumene.org/en/programmes/interreligiousdialogue/current-dialogue/magazine.html Current Dialogue (Special Issue) Editorial December 2011 Editorial Current Dialogue, published by the World Council of Churches for more than 25 years, is one of the oldest and most respected international journals in the field of Christian interreligious engagement. It has been a particular joy for me to be able to restart its publication after a gap of a couple of years. So it is excellent that this issue provides such a rich feast. It is a ‘special edition’ which contains the majority of papers presented at a WCC consultation held in December 2009 which explored ‘Christian self-understanding in the context of Buddhism.’ The consultation was organised by Rev Dr Shanta Premawardhana, and on the page opposite he introduces the consultation. The meeting was one of a series that has been organised by the WCC in recent years, exploring Christian self-understanding in the context of particular religions. It is intended that papers from the consultations relating to Islam and to Judaism will appear in Current Dialogue in June and December 2012. I want to pay tribute both to Shanta Premawardhana and to Rima Barsoum, my predecessors at the World Council of Churches, for their hard work both in organising these consultations and for taking responsibility the initial stages of preparing the material for publication. A key task for me in the first half of 2012 will be to take forward the insights from these specifically targeted consultations (as well as meetings relating to Hinduism and Indigenous Religions) . I will be working with an ecumenical group to provide an overall report on ‘Christian self-understanding in the context of religious plurality’ which will be presented to the meeting of the WCC Central Committee next August. I am sure that it will provide some interesting material for future issues of Current Dialogue. We have taken the opportunity of the gap in the publication of Current Dialogue to update and rationale the mailing list of subscribers. We are intending to continue to publish both in hard copy and electronic form, although we hope that increasingly people will be able to receive and read it electronically. If you are not already a subscriber to Current Dialogue but would like to be, please contact my colleague Marietta Ruhland on [email protected] and ask for your name to be included. Without the help and hard work of both Marietta and Yvette Milosevic the journal would not have been able to appear at this point in time and I give thanks to them for their excellent support of me in my first months working for the World Council of Churches. Clare Amos Programme Coordinator for Interreligious Dialogue and Cooperation World Council of Churches 2 Introduction to Special Edition of Current Dialogue Current Dialogue (Special Issue) Christian Self-Understanding in the Context of Buddhism December 2011 Rev. Dr. Shanta Premawardhana Introduction to Special Edition of Current Dialogue Christian Self-Understanding in the Context of Buddhism Rev. Dr. Shanta Premawardhana While questions about how Christians should relate to people of other religions, and articulating the theological justifications for doing so, are as old as the church itself, they need to be re-stated for each generation. In the past few centuries, when the colonial missionary movement was strong, the realization that in many colonized countries there were religious people who were devout adherents of ancient faith traditions, and whose deeply held beliefs and devout lifestyles were exemplary had begun to dawn. This raised many new questions about missionary theology and methods. Indeed, when the International Missionary Conference convened in Edinburgh, Scotland, a century ago, the question of how Christians relate with people of other religions was a significant part of the agenda. Following that momentous event, and throughout the past century, ecumenical leaders, theologians and congresses sought to address why and how Christians should engage with people of other religions. The history of such engagement is well catalogued by Wesley Ariarajah in his Hindus and Christians: A Century of Protestant Ecumenical Thought , Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991 . The 21st century brought with it a new set of questions. The role of religion in public life, including massive geo-political changes, shifts in religious demographics, religious people’s participation in terrorism and violence, as well as religions’ potential as agents for justice and peace are but a few of the serious questions that needed to be addressed in the contemporary context. It was this realization that led the 2006 Porto Alegre General Assembly of the World Council of Churches to engage the question of Christian self- understanding in the context of many religions. In the years that followed, the WCC has engaged in several consultations to address this question in relation to particular religions. The present volume contains the presentations made at, and the final statement from the consultation on Christian self-understanding in the context of Buddhism held in Colombo, Sri Lanka from 9-12 December, 2009. Given the multiplicity of theological traditions within the ecumenical movement, reaching a comprehensive theological agreement on any question is a significant challenge, and this one particularly so. Agreement on the necessity of working towards such a consensus itself signals the heightened awareness Christians throughout the world have of the importance of this question. In many contexts, the peace and harmony with which Christians and their other religious neighbors have lived in for centuries have been challenged in recent times. Local and global politics, the spreading neo-liberal globalization, and a new missionary movement that is not particularly attentive to local cultures and religious sensitivities have created new tensions. The missionary movement’s alliance with the colonial political and economic power structure sullied its motivations from the outset. The British East India Company, the economic engine of the British colonial period, initially did not trust the missionaries and did not want them in the colonies. However, when it became clear that conversions of Buddhists in Sri Lanka, for example, would also lead to a subtle shift in their political allegiances and make them look more favorably towards the British, reducing thereby the chances for revolt, missionary activities were encouraged. Conversion to Christianity requires a hard change of identity. In cultures where religion, ethnicity, language and political affiliations are often intertwined, a hard change of identity in religion threatens 3 Introduction to Special Edition of Current Dialogue Current Dialogue (Special Issue) Christian Self-Understanding in the Context of Buddhism December 2011 Rev. Dr. Shanta Premawardhana the integrity of the convert’s other identities. Converts to Christianity therefore lost their credibility in their own cultural/ethnic/language groups, creating an uncomfortable and often unnecessary tension. These tensions were exacerbated because evangelistic methods that some Christian missionaries used were aggressive by any measure. In the middle of the last century, as the colonial period ended, the churches in formerly colonized countries had an opportunity to articulate a theology that is appropriate to their context, and to find ways of ministry indigenous to their cultures. In multi-religious contexts, such theologies included their Christian self-understanding in the context of those particular religions. In Sri Lanka, theologians such as the late Rev. Lynn de Silva, a Methodist, and Father Aloysius Peiris, a Jesuit, were in the forefront of articulating alternative theologies of relating to Buddhists. New institutions that arose in the 1960s, such as the Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue, the Theological College of Lanka and the Tulana Centre for Study and Research continue to articulate such alternative
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